Once usable for analysis, PPG said the he cleansed item information will assist in sourcing efforts that are already saving the company millions of dollars.

The Softface Procurement Intelligence Suite will additionally be leveraged in an online environment to ensure that suppliers bid on sourcing events with accuracy.

Prior to selecting the Softface product, PPG Industries said it utilized a manual approach that was unable to manage the hundreds of thousands of purchasing transactions executed throughout the company. With over 20 different data sources, each with its own item descriptions and groupings, reconciling all the data in one place to support corporate-level strategic sourcing was difficult.

PPG said the Softface Procurement Intelligence Suite was selected for its ability to consolidate information quickly into precisely cleansed information. The suite also enables PPG Industries to execute sourcing events and then measure success against the new contracts by providing the detailed commodity, services and supplier information that PPG said is core to a successful, repeatable sourcing process.

"With the perfectly structured and attribute-rich information that the Softface solution will provide us, we expect to analyze our spending at a highly detailed level to support strategic sourcing decisions, and we will be able to track our savings over time," said Jim Polak, director of General Purchasing at PPG Industries. "With this product, we now have the ability to automate a piece of our supply chain infrastructure that will provide us a significant competitive advantage."

Softface said its customers generally achieve in excess of 6 percent savings from their overall indirect spending, which in many cases represents tens of millions of dollars in savings each year.